PRESENTATION SKILLS TIPS–ORGANISE YOUR PRESENTATION

Presenters must engage their audience. That's the main imperative of presenting. But beyond the vigour, volume or resonance of the voice there is so much that you can do to organise your presentation for maximum effect. The top 10 presentation skills tips will help you to organise your arguments.

Organise your presentation

1. Tell them technique. It has 3 main components. The first stage involves you telling your audience what you are about to tell them, the second phase has you telling the audience and the third and final stage involves you telling the audience what you have just told them. Simple indeed.

2. Stepping stones technique. Your main presentation points are plotted at the beginning and the end of your presentation structure, and lesser points are plotted between them.

3. Acrostic. Using what is essentially a word puzzle you use a technique for spelling out the theme of a presentation plus its major defining points. Using either the first, middle, last or consecutive letters of a word in a line allows you to spell out a major theme.

4. Stories and anecdotes. Stories have been used throughout history to commend a course of action or explanation. And presenting today is no different

5. Problem, cause, solution. This technique could be paraphrased as the what, so what, now what technique. It enables you to map out a problem that is well known to the audience, detail its causes and then expound on a solution.

6. Analogy. With an analogy you use something that is familiar to your audience to either drape over the unfamiliar or support the evidence of the unfamiliar. For an audience of telecoms executives you might reference the business of customer service to that of a mobile handset.

7. Logical dilemma. Logical structures are the rhetorical devices of old. With the dilemma technique you supply logical, reasoned proof that an alternative viewpoint or proposition is invalid. Today it might be labelled evidence-based policy/ practice.

8. Logic – deductive logic. Here you make two proposals or statements; one is primary and the other is secondary. Each statement has a common element. You then make a third statement that can be logically implied by the other two statements.

9. Logic - inductive logic. With this technique you can arrive at a generalisation – a broad conclusion. Less finite than deductive logic, it allows you to make a series of observations in your presentation with shared circumstances, and then propose a conclusion.

10. Logic - analogy. You use this technique when you cite an example or case study with seemingly identical characteristics to the subject matter. You make the suggestion that if the case study has the same characteristics then it is logical to suggest that it shares identical causes or fundamentals with the main subject.  

These top ten techniques are equally valid for the range of presenting opportunities you face – board room, conferences, seminars or hospitality events. In short they are essential tools for effective presenters.

You can discover more presentation skills tips on a PresentPerfect^TM skills training course.

"Talkers are usually more articulate than doers, since talk is their specialty."

Thomas Sowell